There are also versions of this template for specific languages that also print the language's name, intended to be used the first time that language is used in the article. For example, "{{keel-de|die deutsche Sprache}}" and "{{keel-liv|līvõ kēļ}}" gives "saksa keelesdie deutsche Sprache" and "liivi keeleslīvõ kēļ".

Language subtags can also be used to indicate writing script or regional variation of a language. According to the W3C, "The golden rule when creating language tags is to keep the tag as short as possible",[1] so such subtags should only be added if there is an important reason to use them. ISO 639-1 is preferred over ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3.

For example, Russian is usually written in the Cyrillic alphabet, therefore the 'Cyrl' script code is superfluous and the language code will be ru instead of ru-Cyrl. However, when that text is transliterated the Latn code (latin script) should be used because it isn't the default script for Russian: ru-Latn. Example:

IANA maintains a list specifying when the script tag should be suppressed [2]. In some cases the script must be always specified, like Tajik which can be equally written in Arabic, Latin or Cyrillic alphabets:

The {{lang}} template is not only used to specify the language of foreign words, but also to specify a single symbol or character in a specific script, for example when discussing about a specific writing system. Many times the character/symbol is used in several languages, but when the article refers to the grapheme itself the ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 language code und for Undetermined language. For example:

The {{keel|und-Hani|字}} Han character has 6 strokes.

The 字 Han character has 6 strokes.

Han characters are used in Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese, and in this case the character is not used for any specific language. Note that the script code used is Hani, which specifies generic Han characters (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja).

In some cases, maybe it will be needed to add ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes (specific usage of that country). Of course the three codes can appear in the same tag, for example the code zh-Hant-TW will be used for Chinese text written with Traditional Han characters, containing words or expressions specific to Taiwan. zh-Hans is for simplified. Examples:

This is great for CJK where a character can be given its language-specific shape but will fall back to another form if no appropriate font is found or if the preferred font lacks that character, for example because the language does not make use of that character: see this comparison table and screenshot.